When will The Simpsons end?

I went to Hulu to watch a new episode of The Simpsons, for some reason I actually have watched the majority of the episodes for this season so far, I don't even know how that happened. Then I looked at the season number and realized that at 22, it has been running longer than I have been alive. Which has always been the case, but it's a bit more startling when one becomes a legal adult. It's also an incredibly terrible show now. 

The question is: how much longer can the Simpsons last? With the primary voice actors taking $400,000 an episode (apparently even Yeardly Smith is included, she only does one damn character!), and ratings dropping dramatically, with the season premiere ratings going from 9.3 to 8.3 to 7.8 million, with apparently a 6.9 average over the whole season so far, the The Simpsons will soon become insolvent if these trends continue. That's not abysmal, and it's way more than the recent episodes of a show like Fringe or even Community, but compare it to the latest season premieres of some other well known shows: 9.68 L&O SVU, 12.5 Glee, 8.4 The Office, 10.5 House (and that's just as horrible as The Simpsons now), 14.65 Two And A Half Men (!), 12.8 The Good Wife, 19.4 NCIS, and I'm tired of looking up ratings on Wikipedia, but you get the idea. 

You can't vote for 23 because it's already been renewed. I should note that 36+ means either the 36th or a season sometime after it that I did not include for the sake of making a poll. This is different from the last option, which is stating that the Fox executives will have the decision to cancel it made for them.

It will definitely make it until 25, it's worth the money to Fox just to have a nice round number like that to put on the boxes for their longest running prime-time show of all time, no matter how much the ratings plummet. If the ratings are enough to renew it to 26, then they'll probably drag it out to around 30. I will vote 28 as a compromise. I can't see it making it to 35, but I included the option for the ambitious among you. If Guiding Light can go for 57 years and The Real World is still on the air...


Edited by Henry Plainview - December 16 2010 at 02:38

I'd say hopefully soon. But I should think there'll be another sad attempt for a movie before they end it. It does seem, that they've ran out of ideas with all these, that's why they use actual happenings as guidelines.

You know, it's a lot easier to carry on a soap opera for 100 years when the whole genre is based on repeating certain topics and changes, but comedy's a different thing. Also, Simpsons have a problem of being the comedy for the whole family, so you can't really start swearing or using sex and drugs and rock'n'roll as sources of comedy... Kids still like it I should think... 

they can make an episode aginst Scientology so can Nancy Cartwright quit and then their is no Bart Simpsons, and no Bart no the Simpson

Edited by aginor - December 16 2010 at 03:52

You will wake up one day and it will all have been a dream.

Henry Plainview wrote: Sorry for the double post, it's all Opera's fault. Tapfret wrote: It is shocking that it has been around this long. It just goes to show that ratings don't mean much. It depends on their expenses. The voice actors may be getting paid a lot, but TV quality 2D animation is cheap compared to filming people in real life, as far as I know. And I was pointing out its decline in popularity against other things, which will be a problem financially if it keeps declining, but it still has more viewers than a lot of things, especially compared to cable, although of course that's a different revenue system. But the Simpsons can be propped by licensing royalties in place of subscription fees.

All very good points, I was merely pointing out that from a ratings perspective it has almost always placed in the lower tier.

And remember, the Simsons are the only thing saving us from the Seth McFarlane block!

You know they'd be replaced with another terrible Family Guy clone


King of the Hill was canned for that piece of trash?

It ended 12 years ago, as far as I'm concerned

jampa17 wrote: manofmystery wrote: It ended 12 years ago, as far as I'm concerned  Dennying reality is the only way to survive in this World... I like it...

 

Slartibartfast wrote: You will wake up one day and it will all have been a dream.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....sounds like the ending of 'Newhart'.

Tapfret wrote: manofmystery wrote: It ended 12 years ago, as far as I'm concerned You have just condemned yourself to being known as "The Walter of the Simpsons". Yeah, it gets hit and miss, but the hits are still hilarious. The box battle vs. the UPS drivers was a riot.